Last week I jumped at the chance to have a 30 mins coaching call with Bailey Richert and you should have seen my inability to subdue my inner-fangirl during the coaching session. Anyways, I have no clue when the video will come up on her channel so I decided to share with you what I learnt (:
I got to ask only 1 question and I decided to zoom in on Affiliate Partnerships - my favourite marketing strategy. Here’s the top 3 things I got from the call:
1. Speakers are usually your affiliate partners
This may sound really obvious to some of you but when I was encouraging other people outside of my event circle to be part of my affiliate partnership programme, I realised how tough it is to rope them in. Even when there is monetary compensation, and the easy “work” of promoting to their list. I just thought that I’m missing some secret strategy to roping in people as affiliate partners and Bailey just confirmed that it’s always just the speakers.
2. Encourage your speakers to promote your event for you but don’t make it a compulsory policy in the agreement
I noticed that around 50% of my speakers promote my event and this figure happens without me encouraging them to promote or including this term anywhere in my e-mail correspondence to them. So I thought that maybe I should do better in having my speakers be more involved in my event promotional activities.
My question to Bailey was “should I include a term in the agreement for speakers to promote the virtual summit”?
Answer: It’s better to encourage your speakers to promote the event but not make the promotion mandatory because this event is all about building relationships. Assuming they “violate” the contract of not promoting, who’s going to enforce these policies?
Lightbulb moment.
3. Keep speakers updated weekly on the event progress so that you can build excitement for the event (and they are more likely to promote)
This is a huge weakness of mine and I usually take the stance of “don’t disturb them because they are so busy” so I tend to rarely pop into my speakers inbox or telegram or whatsapp.
I mean they are self-made millionaires and accomplished figures who've been on Forbes. Why would they want to read my emails, psssh. I'm sure they have better things to do and I already ask too much of their time. (yes, you just read my thought process)
That’s why Bailey recommends sending an update email that doesn't require any response. It can be the speakers line-up that just confirmed that week or the number of attendees that had registered. She sets a routine of personally sending a speaker update email every Monday to keep speakers engaged and excited for the event, and this results in speakers being more likely to promote the event for you.
Cheerios,
Rashidah